This is Democracy – Episode 15: The 100th Anniversary of the First World War

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Intro Voices: This is democracy. A podcast that explores the interracial, intergenerational, and intersectional unheard voices living in the world’s most influential democracy.
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Jeremi Suri: Welcome to our new episode of “This is Democracy” in the aftermath of our discussion of the midterm elections, we’ve had the opportunity to celebrate Armistice Day, or as it’s now called Veteran’s Day. Today’s episode will focus on World War I (WWI) and the legacies of that important war for our society today. Particularly what all of us listening who did not live through WWI what we can learn from the history of this cataclysmic event, and it’s continued relevance for our society today. We have with us one of my dear friends and wonderful colleagues, Michael Stoff. He’s not only a great and distinguished teacher, he’s one of the best people whose written about the war in 20th century including World Wars 1 and 2, and many other related issues. Michael welcome.
Michael Stoff: Thank you, Jeremi. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Jeremi: It’s wonderful to have you on. So we’re going to start with a poem but today we don’t have Zachary, because he’s on a school field trip so instead of Zachary Suri, we have the great T.S. Eliot and this is a poem of his from 1925 written in the aftermath of World War I.
T.S. Eliot: “We are the hollow men. We are the stuffed men. Leaning together, headpiece filled with straw. Alas! Our dried voices, when we whisper together are quiet and meaningless as wind in dry grass or rats’ feet over broken glass in our dry cellar. Shape without form, shade without color, paralyzed force, gesture without motion; those who have crossed with direct eyes, to death’s other kingdom. Remember us – if at all – not as lost violent souls, but only as the hollow men, the stuffed men.”
Jeremi: Wow, its bone chilling.
Michael: It certainly is.
Jeremi: Why is T.S Eliot, Michael referring to the experience after World War I as a period of hollow men?
Michael: The war was devastating, 20 million people killed in that war and the world itself, the fighting of the war was so desperately horrible. This was the application of industrialization to warfare. First experimented within the American Civil War but now on a scale never before experienced. You would get in a single morning 60,000 casualties…
Jeremi: My gosh.
Michael: In a single battle. That is horrific. And of course, the nature of the war itself, beyond the application of industrial technology and among that industrial technology of course we have large scale artillery, rail guns, guns that had previously been on ships now on rail. Giant artillery weapons, big birth of the Paris gun which could hit from Germany. It could hit Paris. These were terror weapons that terrorized not just the soldiers but civilians. Most men who were killed in World War I, never saw the person who fired the weapon that killed them. You had machine guns spitting out 400 to 600 rounds per minute. Poison gas, and the application of technologies that we still use today. The famous land cruiser, code named “tank.” Air and sea weapons, aerial of bombardment of non-combatance civilians. The submarine. These are all horrific weapons and of course the scars that result from that war. Those weapons largely turned the war into a defensive struggle, which meant of course trench warfare. And trench warfare cut out 2,500 miles of trenches in Europe alone. Men would peek out over those trenches and of course they would be shot, often in the face.
So you get these horrible wounds that the French called them “broken faces.” And the result is that at least in part is advances us in surgery. You also get a tremendous sound and fury from these weapons, producing a kind of shell shock that was a term coined around this period which suggested that men actually had their brains shocked, physically shocked from the sound and the implosive force of these weapons. We later of course came to refer to this as battle fatigue and later still as PTSD. And I think to some degree, that is what Eliot is talking about here. The way in which war hollows men out. The Japanese have a phrase for it, [inaudible 00:05:18] which means losing one’s self. You lose the interior and you see this vacant odd look which we associate with PTSD in not just the soldiers but the civilians who are exposed to this so this effected a whole generation powerfully. And the result of course is this hollowing out of human beings.
Jeremi: So it was different from other wars right?
Michael: I think so. The Civil War really approaches this. But now as I say the scale is so great. And these defensive struggles essentially end with very little progress in either direction. We’re talking about sometimes a matter of feet and changing hands. And changing back again. So this terrible, terrible kind of paralysis on the battle field both in terms of individuals but also in terms of armies being stuck in this defensive battle. Of course tanks break that cycle and bring the advantage back to the offense but they don’t really come into play until 1916-17.
Jeremi: Right and until more than halfway through the war.
Michael. Oh yes.
Jeremi: So Michael it’s a complicated question that books and books have been written about. But briefly, why was this horrible war fought by countries who’s Monarchs were actually related to one another?
Michael: Well, a couple of things here, Jeremi. It’s a very good question. One of the things that happens in that the old world old of imperialism, military alliances, balances of power, spheres of influence very rapidly broke down in the face of the desire to capture more and more territory, so you have old imperial powers like France and England, fighting against new imperial powers like Germany, and these nations are rubbing up against each other all over the globe in very uncomfortable ways. A small spark will set off these wars given the fact that you already have military alliances and enormous arms races which is one of the reasons of course why Woodrow Wilson seeks to change the world order.
Jeremi: To make it a war that ends all wars.
Michael: Yes, it was a noble hope but one unrealized in the end. He simply could not get the world to agree that international corporation and collective security would be the new way of the world. That narrow nationalism, and we see the growth of nationalism at the turn of the 20th century, and that kind of nationalism Wilson recognized, and I think he was right, can be very, very dangerous. We would see that nationalism rise again in the 1920s and with particular power in the 1930s, and we see it rising again today.
Jeremi: It’s interesting because French president Emanuel Macron at the Armistice celebration this Sunday, made precisely this point in precisely the words you just used that nationalism can be incredibly destructive when uncontrolled.
Michael: Absolutely, and we can see it in that First World War, and then we see it again in the Second World War. Look, Churchill made it clear he was probably the first to make the case that these were really the same war in some ways that the unresolved issues of World War I, the failed peace of World War I really led to World War II. In fact these wars might be considered the second Thirty Years War.
Jeremi: Right, right.
Michael: With this period of uneasy peace in the 1920s and ’30s, and frankly the ’30s weren’t very peaceful as you well know, whether you look at Asia and the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, and then the full-blown war between Japan and China in 1937, or you look at Europe, and the step by step aggression both in Europe, and of course by the Italians in North Africa.
Jeremi: So, Michael, one of the things I’ve noted as a historian and someone like you who travels a lot is that Europeans are much more conscious of the history of this war. In fact, many Americans don’t even recognize that Veteran’s Day is really marking the end of World War I. What are some of the legacies that particularly Americans should be conscious of that we’re often not conscious of when we think of this war?
Michael: It’s all too true, Jeremi, that Americans have a limited sense of the power of this war. There are several legacies. From my own work: oil.
Jeremi: Yes.
Michael: One diplomat said at the end of the war, “The Allies floated to victory on a sea of oil.” And the end of that war set off a scramble for oil concessions particularly in the Middle East. So one legacy is the drive for the strategic resource and then the power of that resource not simply to drive war engines but to be used a diplomatic tool. We see that happening today, of course.
There are other legacies of this war, of course, not least, of the Russian Revolution. So we see in Russia a collapse of the old tsarist’s regime. We see these monarchical regimes collapsing all over the world but with particular force in Russia and the creation of a Marxist-Leninist state which will have a long term effect across the 20th century.
We get a new face in Europe as a result of this war. Countries now being carved out of the old German, Austro-Hungarian, and Turkish empires. Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Romania, Hungary, all of these countries now have new boundaries and now have new ambitions on their own.
We get a new face in the Middle East. A new face that’s carved out of the old Ottoman Empire. As I say, in 1916, the Sykes-Pico Agreement carved up the old Ottoman Empire like a Christmas turkey, and ended up producing countries that really were not ethnically or religiously parallel to each other. Iraq is the best example in here.
Jeremi: Much of the modern Middle East is [inaudible 11:54]
Michael: Absolutely, and much of the trouble in the modern Middle East, or at least some of it comes from these very unnatural creations of the West. As I say, Iraq is a prime example where you get three old Turkish provinces now put together, and in the process, you put together Sunni and Shia and Kurds, and they are not a natural combination by any stretch. And of course you get the Balfour Declaration in 1917, promising a Jewish homeland, so this creates the stage for a Middle East that is deeply troubled almost immediately after the war, and of course that trouble stretches through the 20th and frankly through the 21st century as well.
There are other legacies. We ought not to forget women here. Women on the front lines as nurses but also as what were referred to as Hello Girls. These were the telephone operators that were very often relaying messages to the front under enormous pressure. You get women working in factories at home, particularly in the United States, and the resolve, at least in part is a new pressure for women’s suffrage. So this is a podcast about democracy, well one of the things that comes out of the war is greater democracy for women. Germany in 1919 gives women the vote. Britain in 1918, the United States in 1920. So female suffrage at least in part comes out of this war. We could go on and one with the legacies they are multiple.
Jeremi: This is wonderful, Michael. You’ve covered so much so succinctly there. One more topic I want to add in terms of a legacy is intolerance at home. One of the consequences of this war, and it’s a consequence of many wars, is while space opens in democracy for women, and perhaps for other minorities who get involved in the war, there also is a closing off to dissent, and I wonder if you’d comment on that as well.
Michael: Absolutely, Jeremi. During the war, at home, I’m assuming you’re talking about here in the United States, but this is true in other nations as well. But certainly in the United States you get a series of laws that narrow the possibilities for dissent in wartime. To me, the most dangerous of this is the Sedition Act of 1918, which makes it a crime to criticize any aspect of the war, including taxes. So the American right, as old as the republic itself, older even, to criticize taxes now becomes a crime, and the result is that speech now becomes politicized in a way that is extremely dangerous. You get people like Eugene Debs for example, who criticizes conscription, which by the way is another legacy of the war, begins in the United States during the American Civil War but now it spreads. Britain for the first time conscripts its soldiers. The same with Germany during that war, but in the case of Debs, he criticizes conscription as one representative in the House said, “There’s very little different between a convict and a conscript. Both are forced to do things that they may not want to do.”
Jeremi: And Debs of course had been a presidential candidate. He had one more than a million votes.
Michael: In 1912.
Jeremi: Yeah, but then he’s put in jail, right?
Michael: He’s put in jail, and eventually let out in the 1920s. So once one lets the demons of intolerance out, and Wilson recognized this, once you do that, then there’s no controlling them. And that is a danger that we should be very sensitive to as well. You get a propaganda campaign run by an executive agency knows as the Committee on Public Information, and here the aim was to whip up hatred of the enemy. When the United States enter the war as you well know, there was deep disagreement about whether the United States should even be in the war, and you had a population that was mixed, an immigrant population with some immigrants like the Irish and the Germans being in favor of the Central Powers: Germany, Austria, Hungary. The Irish for obvious reasons, colonized by there were by the British.
Jeremi: Right, not going to support the British.
Michael: And then you get the descendants of Brits, who are very much in favor or the Allied Powers, so there’s real disagreement about this war, and one of the aims of the propaganda campaign during the war was to unite the nation behind this idea that there was a common enemy, that the war was going to end all wars, in Wilson’s phrase, we talked about this before the podcast began, and the result was, however, to demonize Germans, among others, but particularly Germans, so much so that German citizens in the United States began to deny their German heritage. They called themselves Dutch. We’re not really Germans. We’re Dutch.
Jeremi: And then they changed their names.
Michael: Many changed their names and many, quite a few in the immediate aftermath of the war were attacked, assaulted, as still enemies of the United States.
Jeremi: One of the points I often make, Michael, to students is that there’s actually nothing more American than to argue over war. The great senator Bob La Follette from Wisconsin is one of the leading figures in the United States, and he votes against going to war. But there’s always the danger that leaders in war will try to cut off debate, will try to imprison people who disagree and one of the things we struggle with as a democracy right is to organize ourselves for larger projects and wars, when we’re at war, but also to maintain openness to debate, and that’s one of the legacies of World War I is that we didn’t do that very well, did we?
Michael: We did not. And the result of these propaganda campaigns and these new laws was a very dangerous kind of intolerance. On the other hand, what’s remarkable is that during this war, and during the Second World War, free elections continue in the United States.
Jeremi: Yes, yes.
Michael: Granted the United States is only at war for about 18 months, from April of 1917 to November of 1918, so we don’t really have an election. I guess at the tail end in ’18.
Jeremi: A midterm election actually.
Michael: Yes, yes, a midterm election that changes things for Wilson, that makes it more difficult for him to get the Treaty of Versailles through the Senate and through… but the result is he doesn’t get it through and that is part of the legacy of the failed peace, which we haven’t really talked too much about.
Jeremi: Well so, let’s say a little bit about the failed peace then I want to turn to some lessons for today. But the standard argument, of course, is that the Allies, including the Americans, were too harsh with the Germans, but that also Wilson’s ideas for a more cooperative order, a world of collective security and a League of Nations were undermined by Britain and France, but also by American voters. What are your thoughts about that?
Michael: I think most American voters probably would have agreed with the basic tenants of the treaty, had they been given a chance. But they weren’t given a chance, and we have to talk about Henry Cabot Lodge here–
Jeremi: Yes, of course!
Michael: –Who was the head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which first looked at the treaty. Lodge hated Wilson. He hated the idea of Democrats dictating a peace, not just to the world but to Republicans as well, and I think bore some genuine skepticism, merited, that the United States could be drawn in to war through an international body like the League of Nations, which of course comes out of the treaty. I was the prerogative of the legislature. It was not the prerogative of some international organization. As it turned out, of course he was wrong. The agent that he should have feared was not an international one, but the president of the United States who all too often brings the country to war without a declaration of war.
Of course, the harshness of the peace, the humiliation that the German’s suffered, and the economic hit that they took lead, at least in part, to the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich.
Jeremi: Right, right.
Michael: So this peace, which the United States never really is party to, people sign a separate peace with Germany, as you know, is deeply flawed and deeply weakened and does not realize any of the– very few of Wilson’s promises, or at least Wilson’s dreams in the fourteen points.
Jeremi: So it’s really, in a sense, a very sobering story, the amount of death and destruction, the creation of these hollow men or what some came to call a “lost generation” across Europe, and to some extent in the United States, and it’s worth pointing out that there are more than one hundred thousand Americans who died– it’s a much lower number than the Europeans but if you go to any small town in the U.S. to this day, you’ll see monuments toward the dead across any small town– and of course more Americans die from influenza than from the fighting itself. So this is a horrible war as T. S. Elliott and you describe and then it’s a war that seems to end by only becoming a precursor to another war as well as a Great Depression. So, Michael, what are the lessons we need to learn– most people will not spend their lives studying World War I as you have, but they will have to make decisions about whether to go to war or not, or whether to support candidates along those lines. So what are some lessons, as democratic citizens, we should learn?
Michael: I think the first lesson we should learn is how easily and quickly international orders can collapse around us. You know as well as I do that history is filled with contingency.
Jeremi: Yes.
Michael: That what appears inevitable to us, looking backward, was never inevitable to those who live through it, it’s a kind of arrogance of the living against the dead. So I think we have to be very weary, particularly of this moment, when there is no international system in operation that we risk a great deal. I think we have to be weary of the rise of nationalism. This is something, as we said earlier, that Wilson worried about himself. Nationalism and particularly, nationalism that looks inward, quickly can create problems outward. I also think that we need to listen to those who have fought wars, the veterans in particular. We need to allow them to tell their stories. War is horrible, as John Hersey said, “The first postulate of the theorem of war is death. It is not a glorious crusade” and you can see that, by the way, coming out of World War I, if you listen to the music. For example, I play music for my students as they walk into class, we play music and you listen to the songs of the war, of the first World War, they are marshal songs, “Over there, over there, the yanks are coming.”
Jeremi: Of course, George Cohan.
Michael: Correct. The most popular song of World War II? White Christmas, which is really a song about nostalgia, about the home front.
Jeremi: Yes.
Michael: So the horror of that first war now translates into a very different feel about that second war. It’s no longer a glorious crusade, it’s the first theory– the first postulate of the theorem.
Jeremi: Right, right and I think your point, which is worth underlining, is that war can become something that sounds strategic and formulaic if you don’t actually talk to the people who have experienced it.
Michael: Yes, and when we tell our students, 20 million people died in World War I or 55 million people died in World War II, those are statistics, individuals dying are tragedies. And I try and give my students a sense that death on the scale we’re talking about– take the second World War, we’re talking about a death every three seconds, that’s one-thousand one, one-thousand two, one-thousand three, (snaps fingers) dead. One-thousand one, one-thousand two, one-thousand three, (snaps fingers) dead– for six years, for six years.
Jeremi: Wow, wow and I guess also one of the other lessons, you referred to this earlier it’s again worth underlining, is that wars are easier to start than to end, right?
Michael: Yes, they are and they’re difficult to end in a way that will avoid future wars. There are always losers and there are always, even among winners, there are those who feel that they have not gotten what they deserve. Example here, coming out of World War I is Japan. Japan believed that it was a rising power, it suffered from a certain kind of inferiority complex, which was just fed by the peace. The Japanese believe they should take over German colonies, they were not given those colonies and it became a very powerful incentive for them to demonstrate that they really were a power of the first-class and that led, as we know, to all kinds of trouble in Asia in the 1930s and 40s.
Jeremi: Absolutely, absolutely and I think that brings us to, what I think, should be the obvious concluding question to this wonderful discussion. We open with the hollow men because we have hollow men in our society today, I see this in some of my students who have come back from multiple tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere and in this midterm election we had more veterans running than we’ve had running really since the end of World War II. Michael, what, as citizens especially those concerned about our democracy, what should we take from this important history for today? Obviously, be careful about going to war, but what else? What should really be guiding us today from this history?
Michael: Yeah, I think a couple of things, one is I think we ought to take our veterans very seriously– I mentioned this before, we ought to listen to them, we ought to care for them, I think, too, we ought to vote for them. And the reason I say that is because veterans are used to working with a wide variety of people for a common goal. They don’t break down into tribes, the army is designed to bring people together and I’m very hopeful, for example, that we have a number of veterans running and elected to office that we will get a less narrow partisanship and more cooperation, more compromise, which, as you know, is the core of effective politics. So I think that we should take care and be properly skeptical and concerned about the rise in nationalism, as we’ve said many times, we ought to listen to our vets and we ought to educate a younger generation about the horrors of war.
Jeremi: That’s a terrific place to close. I think at the core of our democracy is an understanding that policies have consequences–
Michael: Yes.
Jeremi: And that we need people who can represent us, who don’t simply have bumper stickers and ideological labels for what they do, but have a deeper understanding of these crucial issues.
Michael: And a deeper experience with them.
Jeremi: A deeper experience, which they can have firsthand and, of course, one can acquire through the study of history.
Michael: Correct.
Jeremi: This has been such an enlightening discussion of a very difficult topic. Thank you, Michael.
Michael: My pleasure, Jeremi.
Jeremi: Thank you for joining us on “This is Democracy.”
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Speaker 1: This podcast is produced by the Liberal Arts Development Studio and the College of Liberal Arts at The University of Texas at Austin.
Speaker 2: The music in this episode was written and recorded by Harrison Lemke, and you can find his music at harrisonlempke.com.
Speaker 3: Subscribe and stay tuned for a new episode every Thursday, featuring new perspectives on democracy.
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